The Moor (31 page)

Some time later, filled with beef and leek pie, I gathered my coat and hat around me and stepped into the road. It was very cold, the sky clear, and there was no waiting dog cart. A motorcar went past, an ancient Ford rattletrap by the sound of it, and when my eyes had begun to adjust to the night, I slung my bag over my shoulder and followed in the direction of the Ford.

I knew where I was going, having tramped most of these lanes over the past two weeks, and although they looked very different in the pale, tree-blocked light from overhead, I knew I could not go too far wrong before coming either into the high road that ran from Launceston to Okehampton or the Coryton branch of the railway. I was well fed, adequately insulated as long as I kept moving, burdened only by the light bag and unthreatened by rain; all in all, it was the most pleasant Devonshire stroll I had yet undertaken.

I did not even miss my way (although I did follow the road, bad as it was, rather than cut through the fields on the rough path to Galford Farm). I crossed the Lew near the old dower house, saying hello to the dogs at the mill, who quieted and snuffled my by-now familiar hand, and came to Lew House through the woods at its back. I detoured at the last minute in order to enter by the porch, knowing that Mrs Elliott would think that the more proper behaviour for a guest, and threw open the door to the hall, bursting with fresh air and goodwill.

I was also bursting from the brisk exercise coupled with the soup and Devonshire ale I had drunk, so I hurried through the still house and up the stairs. It was early, but once there, the bed caught my eye. The room was cold and the bed looked soft, and within minutes I had burrowed into it and found warm sleep.

It was still cold in the morning, even colder, I thought, than the day before, and when I had dressed, I went outside to appreciate the morning. My walk was not a long one, but the brisk air and the smell of burning leaves drifting over from Lew Down filled me with well-being and gave me a good appetite for Mrs Elliott's breakfast. Baring-Gould had been in his bed since Friday, she told me, but his energy was returning and she thought he might come down in a day or two. Mr Holmes had got off to a late start on the Sunday, and was not expected back until the next day. And lastly, if I heard strange noises from the dining room, I was not to concern myself, because it would only be the sweep, working on the blocked chimney.

After breakfast I went up and found the annotated book on Devon that had been in Pethering's bag and brought it down with me to the warm hall to read. I pulled one of the armchairs up to the fire, threw some logs onto the red coals, kicked off my shoes, and drew my feet up under me in the chair. It was very pleasant, sitting in the solid, patient old house, in the wood-panelled room with the threadbare, sprung-bottomed furniture. The fire crackled to itself, the cat slept on the bench, the fox and hounds ran across the carved fireplace surround, and occasional voices came from the other end of the house. Sighing, deeply content, I began to read.

The book, too, was like settling in with an old friend in a new setting. We began with a desultory exploration of the ethnology of the inhabitants of Devon and Cornwall and their mixture of Celtic and Saxon blood, and moved on to glance at the Dumnonii, the Romans, and the Picts. The Roman invasion was given a few scattered lines, the introduction of the first lap-dog two pages. Baring-Gould bemoaned the way the tender, graceful melodies of the Devonshire countryside were giving way before the organ and the music-hall ditty, and how the picturesque and sturdy native architecture was scorned by the pretentious London professional. Anecdote tumbled after anecdote, tied together by sweeping generalisations with clouds at their foundations and romantic visions of lost times that were breathtaking in their blithe neglect of facts. Druidic fantasies he dismissed out of hand, while at the same time offering the presence of large crystals in some neolithic huts as proof that those huts had belonged to medicine men (who used the crystals for divining) and numerous small round pebbles in others as evidence of the Stone Age love of games.

I was enjoying myself so much, lost in the pull between respect for the man's boundless enthusiasm and indignation at his inability to take scholarship seriously, that I did not notice Mrs Elliott's approach until she touched my shoulder to get my attention. I looked up startled, to see her holding a yellow envelope in her hand.

"Terribly sorry, mum, but this just came for Mr Holmes, and the rector says would you like to take lunch with him, upstairs. Also, was you expecting Charley—Mr Dunstan—to meet you last night?"

"No, of course not," I lied. "It was a very tentative arrangement."

"Good," she said, sounding relieved. With everything else on her mind, she had simply failed to ask Dunstan to meet me. It was nice to know that even the iron woman was fallible.

I took the envelope and told her, "I'd be happy to take lunch with Mr Baring-Gould."

"Twenty minutes," she said.

I tore open the thin paper, but it was only from the laboratory in London where Holmes had left the gold with its soil sample. Wordier than it needed to be and sprinkled with technical terms that either the sender had misspelt or the telegraphist had found troublesome, it for the most part confirmed what Holmes had already found: a pinch of the purest gold in a dessert-spoonful of humus and sand. It did not tell me what the mixture meant.

I allowed my eyes to rest on the lively carving above the fireplace, the high-tailed hounds and goose-stealing fox that Baring-Gould had said belonged to the Elizabethan period. It occurred to me, to my amusement, that he was quite strictly correct: It did, by style and setting, belong there, even if it had come into actual existence in a century far removed from those of Elizabeth's reign. I dropped my book on the chair, stroked the sleeping cat and the carved fox with equal affection, and went upstairs to make myself look presentable for the nearly blind and infinitely sly old squire of Lew Trenchard.

***

"Mary," he greeted me, in a stronger voice than I had expected. "Come in, my dear, and keep me company as I eat the good Mrs Elliott's fare." He was sitting nearly upright in the carved bed, propped against half a dozen pillows, and a wide, solid table with very short legs had been arranged over his lap and laid with a linen cloth, silver, and a crystal water glass. A smaller, considerably taller table had been laid for me and set facing him at the side of the bed. I began to take my place, and then paused, and stepped around to the head of the bed and briefly kissed his smooth, aged cheek before taking my seat.

He looked both flustered and pleased, but did not comment. "How are you keeping, Mary?" he asked. "And how did you find poor Miss Baskerville?"

***

"I am well, thank you, and Miss Baskerville seems a good deal happier in the bright lights of Plymouth than I believe she would have been in Baskerville Hall."

"A great sadness, though, that she had to give up her family's home."

"Sadness that her parents and brothers died, I agree, but I personally am not convinced of the need to yoke oneself for life to the service of a mere building."

"I have spent my life making Lew House."

"And you have created a place of great dignity and serenity, but I cannot see you demanding that your son and grandson enter penury in order to keep it standing." I do not know why I was so certain of this. One might have thought the immense investment the house represented, not only in pounds sterling but in painstaking thought and emotional commitment, would have caused its creator to demand an equal passion on the part of his descendants, but somehow I did not think that to be true of him. And indeed, after a long moment, he nodded, reluctantly.

"True. But it is hard, living so long and seeing so many old families forced to abandon their heritage and move away from the roots planted by their forefathers. Although I will say that the idea of opening up the central hall and the picture gallery to charabancs of lemonade-swilling families is almost more abhorrent. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be better to return to the Viking way, and burn each man's riches with him when he is gone. You are laughing at me, Mary."

"I'm not," I protested, but seeing the lift of his eyebrow, I admitted, "Well, perhaps a little. But in this case it would be a great pity, to put Lew House to the torch."

"You like it, then?"

"Very much."

"The lot is fallen unto me in a fair ground; I have a goodly heritage,' "he said with a small sigh that I took to be of satisfaction, and then Mrs Elliott and Rosemary came in with the meal.

As I had noticed before, for a man staring death in the face he had a healthy appetite, and ate the simple fare with gusto. He asked me if I had ever tasted mutton from a sheep raised on the herb-rich traditional pasturage of my own Sussex, and I could tell him that yes, one of my neighbours had a small and undisturbed field that had been saved from the plough during the grain-hungry years of the Napoleonic War. He expressed his envy, and proceeded to talk about food, of his lifelong lust for roast goose with sage-and-onion stuffing, which his wife had indulged as often as she could, of the superiority of spit-roasted beef over the pale, half-steamed modern version, of the cheeses of France and the shock of tasting an egg from a hen fed cheaply on fish meal and the wartime blessing of living in a community that produced its own butter. It ended with a small story about the portion of his honeymoon spent in London, when he had subjected his poor young bride to a pantechnicon with its improving display of knowledge through a variety of semiscientific machines and lectures, and the dry sandwiches they had eaten on that occasion. The sandwiches, he said with a note of reminiscence in his voice, had seemed to Grace more than appropriate to the setting.

Then, as if I might take advantage of this slight opening and insert a jemmy under the edge of his personal history, he said quickly, "Tell me what you think about Richard Ketteridge."

I knew instantly that I could not tell him what I feared concerning Ketteridge; Baring-Gould had brought us here to solve the mysterious happenings on his moor, but I prayed it could be done cleanly, without leaving a trail of mistrust, uncertainty, and tension along the way. Holmes might decide to the contrary, but as far as I was concerned, last Friday's discovery of the body in his lake was quite enough involvement for a sickly ninety-year-old man.

"He must have had an extraordinary time up in the Yukon," I said instead. "Has he told you about being buried in the avalanche?"

We talked about that for a while, and I told him about the improvements being made to Baskerville Hall (carefully omitting any reference to a future transfer of ownership) and the secretary's fascination for Hound stories. By that time he seemed to be tiring, so I helped Mrs Elliott lift the heavy little table from the bed and prepared to leave him.

At the door, however, his voice stopped me.

"Mary, I would not want you to think that I failed to notice that you did not actually answer my question about Richard Ketteridge." I looked back at him, dismayed, but I could see no anger in his face, only a mild and humorous regret. "I am ill, true, but I am not easily misled." He closed his eyes and allowed Mrs Elliott to tug and shift his pillows, and I left and went back down the stairs.

However, my peaceful immersion in the prose of Sabine Baring-Gould was not, it seemed, destined immediately to continue. I sat down with
Devon
and the bell rang, and although Rosemary reached the door before I could, the doctor who came in insisted on talking with me. It took ten minutes to convince him of my complete ignorance about any aspect of Baring-Gould's condition save his appetite and his ability to maintain a conversation. Perhaps the man just enjoyed talking with someone who had no physical complaints, I speculated, and returned to my book.

Five minutes later a disturbance in the kitchen first distracted me, then drew me. I stood tentatively inside the door to ask if I might be of help in quelling what had sounded like a minor revolution but on closer inspection appeared to be a family with five children under the age of eight. They all had running noses and hoarse coughs, and this seemed to be the focus of Mrs Elliott's wrath.

"You cannot stay here; Mr Baring-Gould needs his rest, and I can't be risking him taking on that affliction." The husband of the family seemed resigned to an immediate departure, but the wife was sticking to her guns.

"The Squire, he told us, if we needed anything, to come, and we've come."

"Keep your voice down," hissed Mrs Elliott, to little effect. On one hip the woman had a thin baby with a disgusting nose and wearing an extraordinary hotchpotch of clothes; the other children were seated in a row on a kitchen bench eating bread and butter and watching the exchange with interest. The contest between the two women seemed destined to drag on to evening without resolution, until it was interrupted by the furious entrance of Andrew Budd, assistant gardener and my boatman from Friday.

"Who put the bloody cow in the garden?" he demanded loudly.

Mrs Elliott made haste to shush him, the husband responded by getting quickly to his feet, but his wife only claimed this for her own sorrows, having been evicted with five babies and a cow. Without taking his eyes from her, the husband began to sidle towards the door and, between one moment and the next, he clapped his hat to his head and faded out of it, followed by the still-irate Budd.

With that exit accomplished, the other door opened and the doctor entered; I began to feel as if I had walked into a pantomime production. The medical man, however, possessed an authority recognised by all, as well as the means of cutting through the Gordian knot. He hustled the children into their garments and clogs (the two who had them) and sent them out, pulled the wife out as well by the simple statement that he had a house they could use for a week until things were settled, and pushed her out of the kitchen door with the parting over-the-shoulder shot that he would return in two days to check on his patient, but that Mrs Elliott was doing everything perfectly.